Sicko Banned in Cuba for Being Misleading

Ok, this is pretty damn funny. Michael Moore’s movie, “Sicko”, was banned in Cuba. I’ve never seen the movie, but apparently it depicts the horrors of American “for profit” healthcare versus socialist healthcare systems in the countries of Cuba, France, and the UK.

Apparently he chose to showcase the best healthcare Cuba had to offer, which is actually not available to just anyone. Instead, you need to be, I’m guessing, fairly well connected in the Communist Party to visit the hospital showcased in Michael Moore’s movie. In fact, the Cubans banned the movie “Sicko” in their country because they feared a popular backlash if the average citizens saw what the level of care to which the privileged were entitled. You can read about it for yourself in the Guardian UK story.

And we know all of this thanks to Wikileaks, which I feel is doing a service to citizens everywhere. For one, it shows you once again how Communist governments manage their citizenry, and secondly it shows you how dishonest Michael Moore was in trying to mislead people in the name of Socialism.

How to Apportion a Larger Portfolio

My brother called a couple of days ago. His wife has $100,000 to invest and he wanted to know where I thought I should put it. I’ve made recommendations in the past and they’ve always made money; which I feel puts a bit of pressure on me because each time I feel I’ve got to live up to my own record.

It’s also tough because the investment market is so screwed up with the recent actions of the Federal Reserve. In the 1800s, investing was pretty simple, you just put your money in bonds and forgot about it. Since consumer prices went down for most of the 1800s (with the notable exception being the war-time inflation of the Greenback fueled Civil War) the return you received on bonds would be in addition to the additional purchasing power the money itself possessed. Few people invested in the stock market in those days; it was seen as a shady place where individuals like Jay Gould, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and Nathan Rothschild could use their deep pockets and insider information to force a stock price to be whatever suited them at the time. A stock exchange was more casino than sober investment house. Bonds were where the common man should put his money.

Of course, the advent of the Federal Reserve changed all that. Continue reading How to Apportion a Larger Portfolio

12 Days of Christmas Inflation Index

I’ve been saying for a couple of years now that the talk of deflation was going to go the way of the dodo. This year it really seems to have hit home. The only people I see talking about inflation are the bankers at the Fed, who are getting chastized by the international bankers for just using it as a ruse to print money- which is exaclty true.

The Fed points to the Consumer Price Inflation Index as proof that inflation is not happening, but as I pointed out in my book, that index has been tortured to the point where it will confess to anything. I really enjoyed this video entitled Quantitive Easing Explained, for many reasons. Primarily it’s both funny and accurate, but I also love the way it goes over so many items that are more expensive than they were a year ago.

Clearly, comumer prices are going up. The latest story to discuss the rise in consumer prices is the Christmas Index or the price of all the items mentioned in the 12 Days of Christmas. According to the most recent calculation, the Christmas Index is up 10.8% over last year. A 10.8% rise in a basket of goods in a single year is pretty astounding, and I’d venture to guess that it may have something to do with all the money the Fed is printing- call me crazy.

In the 1970s, inflation close to 11% was an unstabalizing force in society and the economy as people began raising prices and demanding more interest in anticipation of future inflation. You know what they say about history and those doomed to repeat it. What can I say, predicting the future is really pretty easy if you know where to look.

The Probability of 4d6, Drop the Lowest, Reroll 1s

No sooner had I figured out that math behind 4d6, drop the lowest, then it seems I was confronted with the gamer practice of rolling 4 six sided dice, re-rolling any 1s, and then dropping the lowest score. One gamer decided just to take my 4d6 math and convert it to 4d5 math figuring that re-rolling 1s meant perpetually re-rolling 1s. Of course, as I asked in the thread, if you’re going to re-roll a 1 every time you get it, why on Earth are you rolling a six sided die to begin with. The dice bag of most D&D/Pathfinder players tends to have more dice than they know what to do with. Wouldn’t it make more sense to just roll four 5 sided dice (which really means you roll a 10 sided die and divide it by two, rounding up) and then add 1 to each die’s result. Doing so would give the same results as 4d6 with a perpetual re-roll and would not involve the seemingly tedious step of re-rolling anything.

Of course most people aren’t as elegance minded as I am, but I also suspect that most people have the habit of re-rolling 1s once and then taking the result whatever it is. My friend Taylor had just asked me a couple of weeks ago how to figure the math on a six sided die with a single re-roll of 1s. That math is actually quite simple. When you roll a six sided die, the chance of getting any particular result is 1 out of six, or .1666 repeating. Now when you roll a one, it creates a new probability event and you re-roll. So for the die to end up on a one would require you to roll a 1 twice in a row. So the odds are 1/6 times 1/6 or 1 in 36, .02777 repeating. Of course, the chances of you rolling a 1 and then rolling any number are the same .02777, so all you need to do is add that amount to the other scores. Thusly, the probability of getting any particular result on a single six sided die with a single re-roll of 1s is:

Result          Probability
1 1/36 or .02777
2 7/36 or .19444
3 7/36 or .19444
4 7/36 or .19444
5 7/36 or .19444
6 7/36 or .19444

Simple enough. But what about the problem of 4d6, single re-roll 1s, and drop the low result? We know for last time that there are 1296 possible combinations of four six sided dice. When we single reroll a 1 result, we still end up with 1296 possible combinations, we’ve simply weighted some more heavily than others. In the problem with a single re-roll of a six sided die, a 1 is still a possible result, it’s just much less likely than any other possible result. Similarly, I figure in the 4d6 problem that there are still 1296 possible results, but we just need to weight them differently. It’s still possible to get a result of (1,1,1,1) on four six sided dice, it’s just much less likely than (6,6,6,6), but how much less likely?

Well, we can see from the six sided die result that getting a result of a six is 7 out of 36, whereas a 1 is only 1 out of 36. If we compare the two probabilities by dividing the chances of the 1 result by the chances of the 6 result, we get 1/36 divided by 7/36, which simplifies to 1 in 7, or .14286. That is, you are the comparative probability of getting a 1, rather than a six (or any other score) is .14286. So if we take an array or results and we weight all the results with 1s by .14286, we should get the results of the array weighted so that 1s are far less likely.

Let’s take a look at a single six sided die’s results to check our work. A six sided die has an equal probability of generating a 1,2,3,4,5, or 6. Each has a probability of 1 in 6. If we multiply the 1 result by 1 in 7 (or .14296) then, we get the following table.

Result Weighted ProbabilityRe-Weighted Probability

1 1/42 1/36 2 1/6 7/36 3 1/6 7/36 4 1/6 7/36 5 1/6 7/36 6 1/6 7/36

The problem here is that the probabilities do not add up to 1 anymore like they are supposed to, but we can re weight them by adding up everything and dividing each probability by the sum. If we add up all the probabilities above, we get 5/6 + 1/42, or 35/42 + 1/42 = 36/42 or .857. If we now divide each probability by the sum of 36/42, we get the re-weighted probability in the column in the table above. Voila! The re-weighted probability is exactly equal to the original probability we calculated in the first table.

What this means is that we can take any array of six sided die results, multiply each result that has a 1 by 1/7 for each 1 it has, re weight the results, and we will get the precise probability of getting each result with a single re roll of ones. If you’re curious, I can show how any exact probability was calculated. Most people don’t care, so I’m leaving that off. Here are each of the following commonly used stat generation methods in D&D/Pathfinder: 2d6+6, 4d6 drop the low, 4d6 with a single re-roll of 1s and drop the low, 3d6+2, and new method I’m proposing which is just 4d5 keep all. I graphed the probabilities of each against their respective scores and got the following graph:

A chart of each of the popular Pathfinder / D&D Stat Generation Methods

Here’s the data that went into generating this graph.

Number2d6+63d64d6, DL4d6, DL, R14d54d4+2

3 .00463 .0007716 5.96eE-07
4 .0139 .003086 1.67eE-05 .0016
5 .0278 .007716 .000192 .0064
6 .0463 .0162 .00262 .016 .003906
7 .0694 .0293 .00873 .032 .01563
8 .0278 .0972 .0478 .0199 .056 .03906
9 .0556 .115 .0702 .0391 .0832 .07813
10 .0833 .125 .0941 .0674 .1088 .1211
11 .111 .125 .114 .0983 .128 .1563
12 .139 .116 .129 .126 .136 .1719
13 .167 .0972 .133 .150 .128 .1563
14 .139 .0694 .123 .155 .1088 .1211
15 .111 .0463 .101 .138 .0832 .07813
16 .083 .0278 .073 .105 .056 .03906
17 .0556 .0139 .0417 .0626 .032 .1563
18 .028 .00463 .0162 .0252.016.003906
19 .0064
20 .0016

Probabilities for Fun and Profit

So it gets around after a time that I’m pretty good with probabilities. Strangely, the management at the casino I work at has asked me to start giving them “the answers” to various problems that their management just hasn’t been able to figure out. I am sometimes astounded as to the questions they’ve started bringing me.

For example, check this one out. If the casino gives away stamps for players playing blue chip games, and the stamps can be traded in for electronics goods at the rate of 3 stamps for every $1 cost of the item, what is the dollar value of the stamps given? It’s obviously $.33, and I feel that my 8-year old daughter could have solved this very simple math problem, however, various members of management came up with the answer of $6 per stamp. I have no idea how they reached this conclusion. It’s funny that people who are in the business of advantage gambling don’t really seem to understand some of the basic math behind it. As I told my manager, these people could never make a living playing poker.

Two days ago I was approached to see if I could solve some more advanced probability questions that they were thinking of doing for a game very close to my heart, Blackjack. I said sure, since they offered to pay me. Here are “the answers”, which I had to figure for both a 5-deck shoe as well as for double deck black jack.

One idea was to pay more if you ever got three sevens on your first three cards. That is, your first hand was 77 and, when you hit, you receive another 7. The bonus would be larger if the sevens were all the same color, and largest if they were suited. I informed management that it was simply not possible to get three suited sevens in double deck Blackjack because there would be, at most, two available. This is, apparently, why they pay me.  They nixed that idea. Continue reading Probabilities for Fun and Profit

The Mathematics Behind 4d6 Drop the Lowest

Unlike most other roleplaying games, Dungeons and Dragons and recently spun off Pathfinder RPG allow for multiple ways to generate your characters starting characteristics. A point-buy system has become the most popular way by most players because it will result in each player having a starting character that is roughly of the same power level. This is a concern for a lot of gaming groups because the games they play are dominated by combat (which chews up quite a bit of game session time per encounter) and players tend to feel resentful if one player is significantly outshining the other players in terms of body count. In more social games, I think disparity in character power levels doesn’t mean as much. If we are roleplaying out Bilbo Baggins’s birthday party does the difference in power level between Gandolph and Samwise Gamgee really matter all that much?

Personally I’ve discovered that I tend to enjoy game sessions where characters tend to be subpar and the power levels are asymmetrically dispersed. First off, it’s a bit more real because not everyone brings equivalent skills to the table in life and why should games that imitate life be all that different. Secondly, something about rolling three six-sided dice (which is abbreviated 3d6 in gamer notation) and having those dictate what your characters scores are in the exact order in which you role them disconnects you from your character. If you’re using a point buy system, or even a method of assigning the stats in the order you like, you become invested in your grand design for the character. Having luck determine what your character’s stats are reinforces that you are not designing this character but instead being asked to play a character who is very different from you and, for that matter, very different than you might have preferred.

Some of the most beloved characters have come from subpar stats. Continue reading The Mathematics Behind 4d6 Drop the Lowest

Gold Breaks the $1300 Mark

Well the COMEX price of gold per ounce has been flirting with $1300 for almost the whole month now. Today it finally crossed over. The greatly boosted the price of my Barrick Gold stock (ticker symbol ABX). Gold stocks have strangely not done quite as well over the same 30 day period. Market pundits would say that this reflects market sentiment that Gold is going to fall back once it hits the $1300 mark. So people bought gold stocks in anticipation of gold hitting $1300 and sold them off as the price of gold got closer- a classic case of buy the rumor, sell the news.

From my experience watching this market, gold will in all likelihood retreat from it’s new high, but I’m thinking it’s new high might be a bit higher than $1300. $1325 to $1350 seems like where it might stop and fall back. Of course, when that happens, people will say that gold is finally starting to collapse and return to where it was ten years ago. These people will be proven wrong when gold hits yet another high another six months down the road. Gold is in a long term bull market and will continue to be for some time. It’s hard to say when, but I don’t see the price of gold coming down anytime soon with the US government running trillion dollar a year deficits and the Federal Reserve undertaking quantitative easing (AKA printing money) in order to stimulate the economy.

How Much Do Religious People Actually Know About Religion

A recent article in the LA Times reports the results of a survey which shows that, on average, the most knowledgable people about religion are those who don’t believe in it. When asked 15 questions about world religions those who reported their personal belief as either Agnostic or Atheist scored highest. The next highest were Mormons and Jews, with Protestant and Catholics brining up the rear.

Wow. I tested this out myself and went and took the Pew Research Questionaire on US Religious Knowledge .  Sure enough, I got 93% correct and I’m an Atheist. So there ya go. We who don’t believe know a lot more than those that do. Of course, it goes a bit deeper than that. I went to sunday school quite a bit growing up and there was those five years of Catholic Theology that I got in parochial school. So my religious knowledge should be far above the norm, but this survey verifies something I have long held as a personal truth. Those that believe most fervently that the Bible is the literal word of God are those that have simply never read the book.

I say this and always get a “Oh yea,” from the Bible thumping Baptists, but I’m usually able to ace them on actual Bible knowledge when we get to discussing things. For instance, I will ask them how exactly they explain Jesus’s actions regarding the fig tree that bore no fruit when it wasn’t supposed to. I often get a glassy eyed stare in response. It gets far worse when you start asking them about comparative Biblical accounts. For instance, why is the “Slaughter of the Innocents” (where King Herod ordered the first male children of all Israelites put to death) only mentioned in the Gospel According the Matthew? Was it not a significant enough event for the other Gospel writers to mention it? Or, for that matter, how come the Gospel According to Mark not include the accounts of Jesus’s Virgin birth? Mark opens up discussing Jesus’s life as an adult. You mean to say that this guy who hung out with Jesus his whole life and wanted to record his life for posterity did not thing the Virgin Birth a significant enough event to actually record? Was he just low on ink?

The vast majority of Christians, particularly those who believe the Bible is the absolute literal way it happened, have no idea that the different Gospels contain different (and occasionally conflicting) accounts of the life of Jesus. They furthermore are very hard pressed to actually know which Gospel has the briefest account of Jesus’s life, and so on.

It has been my lifelong experience that those who believe in religion the most are those who know it the least. It’s strange, given how fervently they seem to cling to their devotion, but it’s true.

Defending the Big Blind and Preflop Hand Selection

I’ve been criticized in my limit play for calling a single raise out of the Big Blind with hands such as A6 offsuit. Poker players are prestigious as Jennifer Harmon in Super System 2 say that you should not call a raise with a hand as weak as A7 off in a 10 full game if the initial raiser is under the gun.

The logic being that an under the gun raise is not an attempt to steal the blinds, but rather a raise based purely on hand strength. And if all forms of Hold’em people tend to avoid hands that might be “dominated”- which is to say they don’t want to be in a hand where they have the same top rank as their opponent and in inferior kicker. In this example, an Ace with a 6 or 7 kicker figures to not do well at all against someone with an Ace and a superior kicker. The reasoning being that if in order to win the hand you’d have to pair your lower rank and hope that the opponent isn’t going to pair his other rank. So, in a match of AK versus A7, the A7 hand has to hope for a board that contains a 7 with no King and that’s the only way he’s going to win. Such is a rare board, and that’s why people fear being dominated.

The thing is that this very reasonable fear of domination leads people to seek hands that are definitely far away from the range of the preflop raiser. Thus, people would not want to call a raise from the big blind with A7, but would instead prefer to call with a hand like 87 suited. Here’s the thing though, if we take a program like Pokerstove, which can evaluate your pot equity (your percentage of winning a hand over infinite trials) and put in A6 offsuit versus a villain with the range of hands of pocket Aces through pocket 99s, plus all Ace-Kings, all Ace-Queens, Ace-Jack suited, and King-Queen suited (a typical preflop raisers range) we discover that A7 has 27% equity against that range.

27% means you’re about a 3-to-1 dog to the preflop raiser, but since we’re discussing limit Hold’em and you’re in the big blind, 3-to-1 is what you’re getting to call a single raise. This is why I defend the blinds with such hands. In deference to those who argue for suited connectors or small pocket pairs, 87 suited has 30% equity against the villains range, and a pocket deuces has 35%. Of course, the problem with deuces is that that equity assumes you’re calling all the way to the river if you don’t improve the board against a hand like AK, and that can be a fairly daunting task. Still, the math seems clear that you can defend your blind with all of these hands and be alright. Continue reading Defending the Big Blind and Preflop Hand Selection